At 57, two-time Super Bowl champion Deion Sanders, has a brand-new bladder.
The University of Colorado coach recently underwent reconstructive surgery to treat an aggressive form of bladder cancer after doctors discovered a tumor this spring.
The procedure, called neobladder reconstruction, uses tissue from the patient’s own small intestine.
Here’s how it’s done:
First surgeons remove the old bladder. Then they cut out about a foot and a half from the ileum, the end section of the small intestine.
Then the surgeon cuts down one side of the segment of intestine so that it lays flat like a sheet. Next, they fold it in half, top to bottom, and then connect the back part to the front.
The end result resembles a volleyball covered in sutures, said Dr. Max Kates, codirector of the Greenberg Bladder Cancer Institute at Johns Hopkins University.
Finally, the surgeon sews the neobladder to the kidneys and urethra.
The human body’s ability to adapt to such a procedure is “amazing,” says Sanders’ surgeon, Dr. Janet Kukreja, director of urologic oncology at the University of Colorado Cancer Center. Patients usually spend just a few days recovering in the hospital.
She performed Sanders’ neobladder reconstruction robotically and with a laparoscopic camera, a method that only requires small incisions.
Kukreja told NPR that a cool aspect of this surgery is that because the neobladder is created from the body’s own tissue, a patient’s immune system doesn’t reject the new organ. So patients with neobladders don’t need immunosuppressant medications.